The premise of this volume is that the disciplines of cognitive neuroscience, development, and psychopathology are complementary in the study of human perception and attention. Although each discipline emerges from a decidedly different and sometimes even incompatible worldview, together they lead to better science. Development is the study of the myriad of changes that occur over the lifetime of an individual, with the focus on uncovering universal categories and structure in that change. In contrast to this emphasis on universals, the study of psychopathology is premised entirely on the obse ... More

The premise of this volume is that the disciplines of cognitive neuroscience, development, and psychopathology are complementary in the study of human perception and attention. Although each discipline emerges from a decidedly different and sometimes even incompatible worldview, together they lead to better science. Development is the study of the myriad of changes that occur over the lifetime of an individual, with the focus on uncovering universal categories and structure in that change. In contrast to this emphasis on universals, the study of psychopathology is premised entirely on the observation of differences between individuals, as researchers of psychopathology try to make sense of a vast array of debilitating conditions, histories, and experiences that lead to specific and usually deleterious outcomes among specific individuals, groups, or populations. The study of cognitive neuroscience offers researchers a wide variety of tools with which to examine specific cognitive functions and behaviors, with a focus on the mechanisms internal to the brain, which underlie functional and behavioral outcomes, especially specific and fine-grained analyses of the neural underpinning of behavior. With the integration of these three areas of scholarship, the emphasis in this volume is on the functional role that neural-based behavior plays in the larger social-emotional-intellectual world and how these neural processes develop over time among typically developing children and adults as well as those with anxiety, depression, autism, dyslexia, and childhood experiences of abuse and neglect.